Always this cheap red. This attachment to foreign matter—the bullet as it becomes indispensable to the existence of bone. How it feels to live with the gunshot that killed a mother before tunneling through a lung to rest snugly in your shoulder. And so the object goes in hiding. Once it threw a hairbrush at the bathroom mirror to encrypt parts of its identity into the shards. It has learned to keep its shoes while washing. The tub drinks the object like a body of water, the legs form parallel poles that dangle from the side. There is much to be suppressed here. There is the sound of sipping through a straw, a drain. It is calling someone for company. It hangs up after the first ring. Then the object is silent. The shirt falls open at the neck like gutted fish.

after James Castle

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This piece is an indirect result of the James Castle exhibit in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, my morbid interest in objectifying anything with a heartbeat, and a weekly consumption of fegato alla veneziana prepared by my husband.